Well, having yarned9 a bit with the cook about the fight between the whale and the thrasher, whilst I warmed my fingers at his genial10 stove, I quitted the galley to go aft again. As I left the structure, the chief mate, standing11 at the break of the poop, sang out for some hands to clew up the main-royal and furl it. The mizzen-royal, I saw, was in process of being stowed by Poole, and there was a fellow dancing up the lower fore-shrouds12 on his way to furl the fore-royal. Some hands came tumbling past me; they let go the halliards and tailed on to the clew-lines, and a couple of sailors jumped on to the bulwarks13 to get into the rigging. One continued on his way aloft; the other halted with his feet still upon the bulwark-rail, and his left hand upon his heart.
He was a short man, with a yellowish, coarse face, dingy14 and stained, the skin like an old blanket. He had a tuft of ginger-coloured beard under his chin, a rounded back that seemed hunched15, and stunted16 bow legs. I looked at him as I came abreast17 on my way to the poop, struck by his lingering when he should have been running aloft—struck, also, by a quite indescribable expression in his face. His eyes were upturned like those of a sleeper18 when you part the lids. I was exactly opposite him when he fell. He tumbled inboards like a wooden[211] figure; and his head struck my shoulder with such force that I was spun19 round and felled, half-senseless, to the deck.
I recovered in a few moments, and sat upright; nobody took any notice of me. A crowd had gathered round the prostrate20 man, and presently two or three of the sailors lifted him up and carried him forwards. He was stone dead! The doctor examined the body, and said it was disease of the heart that had killed him.
I cannot express the effect this shock produced upon me. The mere21 seeing the poor fellow fall a corpse22 would have been painful and terrible to my young nerves; but to be struck by him—to carry about with me a shoulder aching from the blow of his head!—it was an incident that filled my boyish sleep with nightmares that lasted me for a long fortnight. Again and again I would start from my slumbers—from some horrible vision of the dead man clasping me—drawing me from my bed—struggling to carry me on deck to jump overboard with me! Had I found courage to speak out, my mind might have been soothed24; but I did not dare whisper my thoughts for fear of being laughed at, and though the impression faded before long, yet, whilst it lasted I was the most nervous miserable25 creature, I do believe, that was ever afloat.
The burial of this poor fellow gave me an opportunity of witnessing what I cannot but think[212] the most impressive ceremony that is anywhere to be viewed. How solemn a thing is a funeral on shore we all know; but at sea those points and features which render the interment of the dead on land affecting and awful are immeasurably heightened by the vastness of the ocean, the mystery of its depths, the contrast between it and the littleness of the form committed to its great dark heart, and, above all, by the utter extinction26 of the body. Ashore27 there is a grave: you can point to the mound28 or to the stone; but at sea nothing but a bubble follows the plunge29 of the corpse: it is swallowed up in the immensity of the deep as the mounting lark30 dies out in the blue into which it soars.
The dead sailor was stitched up in his hammock and a weight attached to his feet. The shrouded31 figure was placed upon a hatch grating, and the large ensign thrown over it, after which it was brought by four seamen32 to the gangway. The captain stood bare-headed close by, prayer-book in hand; the whole ship’s company gathered round, most of them having made some little difference in their attire33 for the occasion; the passengers collected at the break of the poop, the gentlemen with their caps in their hands, and the ladies looking down upon the quarter-deck with grave and earnest faces. A stillness fell upon the ship, and you heard nothing but the voice of the captain reading[213] the Service, mingled34 with the hissing35 noise of the foam36 washing past, and the humming of the wind in the concavities of the canvas. At a signal one end of the grating was lifted, and the hammock flashed overboard. A shudder37 ran through me as I saw it go. Then, when the last words of the Service had been recited, the captain put on his hat and entered the cabin, the boatswain’s pipe rung out shrilly38 in dismissal of the men, and within a quarter of an hour the ship had regained39 her familiar appearance—the ladies walking on the poop, the captain briskly chatting with some passengers near the wheel, and the sailors of the watch at work on their several jobs about the deck and in the rigging.
It was customary in my time to hold an auction40 of the effects of a dead sailor shortly after his burial. There was an odd mixture of humour and pathos41 in the scene. The poor fellow’s chest was brought on to the quarter-deck, and the mate at the capstan played the part of auctioneer. I stood under the break of the poop, looking on; and, young as I was, I seemed to have mind enough to appreciate the queer appearance the Jacks42 presented as they stood shouldering one another in bunches, with something of shyness in their manner, and with askant, half-sheepish, yet grinning glances directed at the ladies who stood on the poop, viewing the scene.
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There was not much of an auction, for the poor fellow had left very few clothes behind him. He had been one of those improvident43 sailors who will spend in a single night ashore the earnings44 for which they have laboured during a twelvemonth, and who are driven by poverty to ship again in a hurry, often rolling into the forecastle with nothing but a jumper and a pair of tarry breeches in their bags. The articles were held up for the crew to see; Mr. Johnson did not apparently45 relish46 the idea of handling them. The steward pulled a pair of trousers out of the chest, and expanded them between his raised hands.
“What bid for these?” said the mate; “you all behold47 them. Observe that patch; the neatness of the stitching heightens the value of those trousers by at least five shillings more than they are intrinsically worth, if only as an object of art just to look at. How much shall I say?”
One bid two shillings, another five, and the breeches were ultimately knocked down to the cook for ten—not a little to my astonishment48, for it seemed to me that an offer of even threepence for them would have been excessive. The steward then flourished a worn shirt, for which a sailor with a hoarse49 voice offered three-and-sixpence. It was knocked down to him, and, had it been an extraordinary bargain, he could not have looked more pleased. Then a very rusty50 monkey-jacket was[215] exposed, together with a belt and sheath-knife, a pair of shoes which certainly did not match, a greasy51 Scotch52 cap, and one or two other articles of a like nature. They all fetched high prices. The sailors seemed to regard the biddings as a joke; yet it was impossible that there should be much humour in the thing to those to whom these specimens53 of squalid raiment were knocked down, since the money was deducted54 from their pay. Nor could I gather of what use the clothes were likely to prove to the fellows who purchased them, there being superstitious55 fancies in every forecastle concerning dead men’s attire, so that very few sailors will ever be got to clothe themselves in a drowned ship-mate’s dress.
But there is a deal of good nature in the recklessness of Jack’s character, and the bids made at these auctions56 are owing, not to the desire of the men to possess the articles, but to the feeling that the money they spend will be of help to the dead man’s relatives.
The captain, in making the Horn this voyage, was running his ship on the Great Circle track; at all events, he was steering57 a very much more southerly course than was customary with vessels whose masters deemed a wide spread of longitude58 preferable to the risks of ice amongst the narrower meridians59. It was not the harshest time of the year down off the South American headland; but[216] even with Cape60 Horn in sight, the weather would have been bitterly and abominably61 cold. Judge, then, how it was with us when I tell you that the navigation of the Lady Violet carried her to within a league or two of sixty degrees south latitude62. I had often heard of Cape Horn seas and skies, and here they were now with a vengeance—an horizon shrouded by a wall of grey mist to within a musket63-shot of the ship; the shadows of black clouds whirling overhead and darkening the air yet with heavy snowfalls, which blew along in horizontal masses, thick as the contents of a feather-bed, or with volleys of hail big as plums, which rang upon the decks as though tons of bullets were being emptied out of the tops; seas of mountainous height of a dark olive-green, whose white and roaring heads seemed to brush the flying soot23 of the heavens as they came storming at us; the rigging glazed64 with ice; the running gear so frozen that the ropes crackled in our hands as wood spits in a fire; the decks full of water, with such a rolling and plunging65 of them besides that it was sometimes at the risk of your life that you let go the rope you swung by to obey an order—this was my experience of the Horn!
And only a little bit of it, too. Spite of our oilskins, we were so repeatedly wet through that it came to our having no dry clothes to put on. I have known what it is to come down from aloft[217] after reefing the mizzen topsail, and to shed tears, child as I was, with the agony of the cold in my hands. The cook could do nothing with the galley-fire, and there was no warm food to be had. Again and again would we of the watch on deck go below, and appease66 our hunger by a meal of mouldy biscuit, which I would endeavour to sweeten with a coating of salt butter and moist sugar, and with a pannikin of cold water, tasting already like the end of a voyage. The passengers remained in the cuddy. The every-day ship’s routine could not be carried on, and the sailors kept under cover, but always ready to rush out at the first summons. The decks therefore seemed deserted68, and, but for the two hands at the wheel, and but for the mate of the watch, who crouched69 hugging himself under the lee of a square of canvas in the mizzen rigging, the ship might have been deemed abandoned—a craft speeding aimlessly before the
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